Dear colleagues,

With apologies for cross posting, please allow me to announce the news of (and share a discount code for) a new book titled Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety, published by Stanford University Press. The book may be of interest to researchers and students working in the areas of anthropology, Asian studies, affect theory, popular culture, and politics and policy studies at large.

About the book:

How do the worlds that state administrators manage become the feelings publics embody? In Administering Affect, Daniel White addresses this question by documenting the rise of a new Japanese national figure he calls "Pop-Culture Japan," a bureaucratic remedy to growing political anxieties. Based on intimate ethnographic fieldwork among policy makers, Administering Affect locates the emergence of Pop-Culture Japan in the wake of growing regional competitiveness and geopolitical tensions in East Asia. White analyzes various creative policy figures of Pop-Culture Japan such as anime diplomats, Cool Japan branding campaigns, and the so-called Ambassadors of Cute in order to illustrate a powerful link between practices of managing national culture and the circulation of anxiety among Japanese publics. Invoking the term administering affect to illustrate how anxiety becomes a bureaucratic target, technique, and unintended consequence of promoting Japan's national popular culture, the book delivers an anthropological analysis of the affective forces interconnecting state governance, popular culture, and national identity.

Please visit the publisher's link for further details:

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34329

Limited-time code of 30% off, Nov. 10 through Dec. 12: S22XAAA-FM

Daniel White is a research affiliate in social anthropology and associate fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, both at the University of Cambridge. His ongoing projects on the policy impacts of media, technology, and most recently on artificial emotional intelligence can be found at modelemotion.org

___________________

Daniel White
Research Affiliate
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge

www.modelemotion.org

https://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-daniel-white
https://cambridge.academia.edu/DanielWhite

Recent book: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34329

Recent article: https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9655.13813